Cheeze said:
Coming up with theories is hard work! Harder than dealing with miserable customers every day!
/s
Mat purposely uses the YouTube metric to his advantage. He's done a lot of research into how it works and he's applied it to his time as a YouTuber.
People who watch his videos aren't giving him money for the theories themselves; they're giving him money for the video. And Mat isn't the only one who's being paid for these videos, either. Mat has a full team of people who work on them, from script-writing to editing, and Mat himself provides the recordings and his voice. Mat manages this team and thus he gets a slice of that pay.
As Czario said, it's how the entertainment industry works. It may look easy and simple from the surface, but it does actually take a lot of work to edit a video as professionally as Mat's team does. In addition, they're doing it on a regular schedule and uploading it at certain times, meaning they have to work for quite some time on it. Having edited videos myself, and doing it poorly might I add, that alone can take at least six hours on a good day, let alone videos as densely packed as Mat's.
Again, it's fine not to like his videos, pretty much none of us here do either. None of us subscribe to his theories. But the idea that it takes no work to make them is a falsehood. If nothing else, Mat's really good at organization, scheduling, and working with YouTube's confines to make sure he maximizes video output to get the most amount of views he can. If anything, his videos have likely suffered due to him trying to work with YouTube's metric, not inherently because he's bad at making videos. (Especially since some people can agree that his earlier theories aren't as bad as his newer ones, back when he wasn't on this strict schedule he's on now.)
If anything sucks especially it's YouTube for promoting content like his in the way that it does. YouTube has been the bane of a lot of YouTubers' existence; several great animators and other content creators get screwed over simply because the metric doesn't like them.